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Battle of Clear Lake
The Battle of Clear Lake was a battle in the Flettan Rebellion of 1106 between rebels under Xethos Stamnoudus and Nataliya Sytnikov and elements of the Army of Drubyetski under R11 Lon Parkins. It took place on 5 June 1107. Prelude After starting the rebellion late in 1106, reactionary Xethos Stamnoudus and SRB leader Nataliya Sytnikov had been inflicting decisive defeats upon maix est regime'im R15 Franklin Vincent's armies and destroying his network of support in Sceafarice and the southern Fletta. Virtually unknown before the war, they and their army alone had removed nearly 225,000 of Vincent's troops and had lost less than 9,700 of their own in the process. Although this had more to do with Vincent's armies self-destructing through mismanagement and a lack of supplies than their own prowess, their reputation was beginning to terrify Vincent. In late April, Vincent ordered his regular Army of Drubyetski south under R13 Lucas Kinnet to take them out. Stamnoudus and Sytnikov swept aside a division under R11 Marcus Miller at the Battle of Kilborn and moved north, behind Kinnet's army. Kinnet got word of the battle a day later and turned his army around in a forced march to attempt to intercept them. The rebels by this point were able to move faster than the regulars as they had left much of their supplies and their wounded in Kilborn to be moved later and hitched the rest to cavalier Jason Horsley's horses. In an attempt to delay them, Kinnet sent a division under R11 Lon Parkins ahead of the rest in something of an iron man march to intercept and hold the rebels back long enough for the rest of the column to catch up. Parkins managed to catch up to the rebels at Clear Lake, about six days from the rebels' target of Flettaville. Armies This force was easily the strongest of the rebel armies. Stamnoudus fielded 22,714 gastraphetes line infantry remaining split between himself, Tom Woolf, Scott Schlosser, Dan Anglin and Dustin Eskridge; these troops were quickly becoming an elite contingency as they gained melee and shooting experience and acquired more battle experience. Clay Guzalak continued to run eight ballistae manned by the same 120 as he had before. Xena Stamnoudus continued to command her small reserve company of 350. Jason Horsley supported him with 6,816 hussars to the mix, which would be unopposed by the exclusively infantry Army of Drubyetski. Sytnikov's SRB fielded 7,777 regular shieldmaidens under Elisabeth Strand, Anna Vonnegut, Jagna Sienkiewicz and Agnes Stendahl while Viktoria Raske's junior company added 1,364 skirmishers, although Sytnikov would not let them engage in melee. R11 Lon Parkins's division was slightly down from its original 45,000 as it had been garrisoning a few supply depots that the SRB had taken out before the battles had begun, but it was for the most part intact. Cenan R10 Fearghal Ó Floinn acted as second-in-command. It featured one regiment of 4,500 skirmishers under R10 Collin Fricke and the rest were swordsmen. The total rebel force equalled 39,141 soldiers and eight ballistae against Parker's 44,474 soldiers and no artillery. Battle The rebel army, having the only serious cavalry on the west side of the Drubyetski'al, were well aware of Parkins's pursuit by 2 June and began to pick up the pace to draw Parkins as far away from the rest of Kinnet's army as possible before engaging it. By 4 June, Stamnoudus decided he was pushing harder than he really wanted to and halted the army at Clear Lake, which was next to a ridge in a valley. While some of Horsley's cavalry rode out to track the progress of Parkins, the rebels rested and drilled alternately while making use of the local natural resources. Anticipating Parkins' arrival, Stamnoudus deployed his at 09:30 on top of a series of hills on the ridge facing southward. His right was protect by the Smith river and a while his left was guarded by the steep decline of the Clear Lake ridge. Syntikov divided her regulars amongst her four top subordinates and spread them out behind Stamnoudus's line with Strand and Sienkiewicz on the flanks. Horsley was placed well about 1,500 metres behind and out of sight of the enemy while Raske was kept well away from the battleground. Guzalak's ballistae were mounted on the centre ridge, which was about the only clear view of most of the battlefield he could have. Parkins arrived to the battlefield at 10:00 after a 06:00 start. His troops were completely exhausted, but his orders were to hold Stamnoudus and Sytnikov in place. If he sat and waited, Stamnoudus could easily turn around the army and walk away and once stopped, Parkins' troops would be difficult to restart. He decided to attempt to take something of a middle strategy and attempt to fight a piecemeal battle. At 10:15, Parkins sent a regiment under the command of R10 Webster Bedell to probe the rebel left with support from Fricke's skirmishers. Five minutes later, he sent another probing regiment under R10 Myron Stawell to the rebel right. Bedell's stopped about four hundred metres short of the rebel line while Fricke moved forward to exchange fire with Stamnoudus's line. On the other flank, Stawell's regiment got lit up and he retreated after the first volley. Fricke's skirmishers were losing the fight against Stamnoudus's line infantry, but Stamnoudus quickly grew tired of taking casualties. He pulled Anglin's company away from the left flank and moved Woolf's from the centre to the vacancy. Fricke did not react other than to move a little and change his target to Stamnoudus's own company. Bedell began to advance. This exchange took about ten minutes, but Bedell was too cautious and weary to attempt an opportunistic charge and instead retreated before Woolf could fire on him. Stamnoudus then ordered Woolf to advance twenty metres while his own regiment fired, then ordered his own regiment to load and advance forty metres while Woolf fired and loaded. This alternation of firing and advancing steadily allowed Woolf and Stamnoudus to start steadily pushing back Bedell while Fricke was under serious pressure, being outnumbered and at a decreasing range with a slower reload rate due to their windlasses and their fatigue. Their accuracy began to suffer in the face of panic at they'd begun to break by 10:45. Sytnikov saw what they were doing and sent Schlosser and Eskridge off to try a similar tactic on the opposite flank and then signalled Horsley to move closer. Anglin was held back, but she moved the SRB regulars forward in anticipation of supporting a charge, two companies supporting either push. By 11:00, Stamnoudus and Woolf had broken Bedell's troops and were beginning to bear down on Parkins' reserves, which he was desperately trying to prepare. Stamnoudus had caught sight of Eskridge and Schlosser moving up to support him and stopped Woolf about a hundred metres from the edge of the slope at the bottom of which stood Parkins and his command. Once they were alongside, he moved his and Woolf's regiments forward and began firing down the hill into the mass of reforming soldiers. Horsley arrived quickly and Stamnoudus waved him forward and Horsley's cavalry instantly shattered the entire division. Stamnoudus and Sytnikov both charged forward to mop up, but were entirely unneeded. The battle was over by 11:20. Aftermath The battle was a clear tactical for the rebels, though it was not large enough to be considered decisive. The rebels took 76 casualties (14 killed, 62 seriously wounded) and inflicted 1,841 (1,422 killed and 419 wounded). Only 4% of Parkins' division fell and none of his R10s nor himself suffered more than injuries to their dignities. Once again, surgeon Lyla Lehr ended up with most of the credit for keeping the death count low for the rebels. Flettaville's university officially recognized her as a fully qualified surgeon immediately after the battle, the first time it had done so for non-alumni. This was perhaps an attempt to lure her away from the rebels, but it was not successful. Strategically, it was a decisive rebel victory. Parkins' division was far from crippled, but it would take some time to recover it from the morale shock and the extreme fatigue and its side effects it had suffered on the march. Dehydration was a more serious issue on the retreat than casualties. It ended any hope Kinnet had of stopping Stamnoudus short of Flettaville. It also shook his own troops' morale once they had heard the news that one of their full divisions had lost on an open field in less one hour. It made no impact on the Hoktike Score. This battle would mark the first instance that Stamnoudus had left wounded opponents. This and Sytnikov's mid-battle orders demonstrated Sytnikov's increasing influence in the rebel army. Though some of Stamnoudus's troops grumbled about it, but the SRB was thrilled that their leader was gaining back her fervour. This was also the first battle in which Stamnoudus had treated his immediate subordinates as anything other than equals. Dan Anglin was not at all pleased about being swapped with Tom Woolf for what seemed like a basic set of manoeuvring, leading Stamnoudus to replace him with Reid Allamain for the rest of the war. Stamnoudus and Sytnikov would besiege Flettaville on 9 June. The next battle would take place at Peers to the north, though the southern rebels would not fight again until the Battle of Almira.